Your Event Marketing Plan Should Include These Things…

Don’t shy away from these tips when putting together your event marketing plan! Your association will be glad you took the time to make sure you added these in!

When drafting your plan, make sure you are highlighting both goals and budget. What numbers are you looking to achieve? Is it feasible? What dollars have been allocated in the overall conference budget to support achieving these goals, and the steps that need to be undertaken?

Content and Management – with these number highlighted, you need to think about your overall content, and the schedule. What speakers do you want to feature? What special events? What aspects of your tradeshow? Is there a Top 10 list? Before creating anything, make sure your plan is solid, because it will affect your website, blog, app, FOMO, etc.

Where are your promotional efforts focused on? Start with your target market – what does the typical attendee persona look like (you may have several) – include age, stage of career, motivations for attending, as much as you can. You also need to include their preferred methods of outreach here (do they prefer email, do they prefer instagram, what is it?).

Outline your communication plan. How much will you focus on email, social media, web ads, ads in publications, etc.

Personalize! Your data is likely segmented somehow (either by membership type, or other data collected). Use this to your advantage, and plan out HOW you are going to deliver attractive, thought-provoking, interesting content to your target audience.

Collaborate! You have a network of supporters – speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, past attendees – USE them! Create a social media toolkit that your network can tap into to help promote the conference to their own network. Looking to take it up a notch? Consider an influencer marketing tool, like Snoball.

What’s your last minute plan? As much as we want to see attendance rise over time, there are always those “wait until the last minute to register” participants. What messaging are you planning to ensure that you capture these people as much as you can?

Tracking – what does success look like to you? Is it open rates, likes on Facebook, and how these activities drive your attendance? Outline your ideal metrics now, so that you can check-in, measure, and tweak your marketing plan as needed during the process.